Cardano Critical Integrations Budget
This Cardano Critical Integrations Budget Governance Action requests ₳70,000,000 from the Cardano Treasury to establish a strategic integration fund supporting the onboarding of critical infrastructure, including tier-one stablecoins, institutional digital asset custody and wallet infrastructures, on-chain analytics platforms, cross-chain bridges, and pricing oracles to the Cardano ecosystem. This infrastructure establishes the foundational layer required to onboard tier-one stablecoins, with the potential to unlock exponential growth in DeFi transaction volume across the ecosystem. It will also help accelerate ecosystem efforts in other key areas such as Real World Assets (RWA) and DePin. This acceleration is expected to play a key role in supporting Cardano’s path to profitability as a layer one in terms of fee generation, ensuring long-term financial sustainability. This project is being driven through close collaboration between Input | Output Global, the Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO, together with Midnight Foundation and Intersect, all of whom are actively engaged in negotiations with integration partners. Representatives from all five organizations form the Steering Committee, which is responsible for making key strategic decisions. The founding entities and Intersect also recognize the Midnight Foundation’s contributions to date. Infrastructure providers and/or protocol collaborations are in a mature stage, and several partners have already provided detailed pricing and delivery timelines. However, for reasons of strategic and commercial confidentiality, together with partner companies’ compliance requirements, the specific infrastructures involved can only be disclosed outside of the Steering Committee after the integration is completed. The project will follow a milestone-based funding structure, with budget drawdowns executed from Intersect’s custody and administration only upon submission of signed agreements and the agreed scope of work. The Oversight Committee at Intersect will review drawdown requests to confirm that the amounts and designated recipients align with the executed contracts. Since work is already underway in some of these areas, this proposal envisions an early early budget deployment, and we anticipate this budget being utilized immediately and up to 24-month deployment, depending on withdrawal success, contracting periods, and timely receipt.
Reasoning
Written after the vote was cast
What this asks for, and from whom
The Info Action authorizing the Cardano Critical Integrations Budget, the companion to the 70,000,000 ADA withdrawal.
What would have to be true for this to be a good use of treasury funds
Same reasoning as the withdrawal itself. Cardano's integration gap is a genuine competitive disadvantage, not a cosmetic one, and closing it is worth serious money.
What specifically concerns me
Info Action then withdrawal is a two-step structure that can create the impression of double approval for a single decision. The community should read them as one commitment, because that is what they are.
What I am asking of the proposer if this passes
It was dropped while the associated withdrawal was later enacted. My ask stands: report integration outcomes publicly and specifically. This is the category where Cardano most needs wins and most needs to prove it can buy them.